Abstract
In a relatively short time what is known as “comparative theology” has grown to maturity, or at least beyond the turbulence of puberty, as testified by this volume, which is published in Fordham University Press’s series Comparative Theology: Thinking across Traditions, another sign that the discipline has come of age. The book is the fruit of an August 2014 conference in Paderborn, Germany, and is edited by Francis Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity and Comparative Theology at Harvard Divinity School, a father (grandfather?) of comparative theology, and his younger colleague Klaus von Stosch, Professor of Systematic Theology and head of the Center of Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn.
The book consists of 15 chapters, including a very helpful introduction by the editors, which are grouped in three parts. The editors deserve commendation for shaping the volume into a coherent whole, instead of a haphazard collection of essays, a common fate of publications of conference proceedings. The first part argues that the new discipline is theology—comparative theology, to be exact—and not comparative religion and allied disciplines. (It would be instructive to compare this volume with the 2005 volume of a similar title, How to Do Comparative Religion: Three Ways, Many Goals.) The main difference between comparative theology and allied disciplines is the former’s explicit quest for and determination of truth in matters of faith. This point is emphasized by Aaron Langenfeld in his “The Moment of Truth: Comparative and Dogmatic Theology.” In comparing one’s own religious tradition with another several steps are made, and Catherine Cornille (“The Problem of Choice in Comparative Theology”) outlines four: intensification, recovery, reinterpretation, and appropriation. Klaus von Stosch puts this comparative method into practice in his study of the Qur’an’s approaches to Jesus (“Reflecting on Approaches to Jesus in the Qur’ān from the Perspective of Comparative Theology”). Other essays in the first part carry comparisons further, such as Hugh Nicholson’s between Athanasious and Vasubandhu, and Axel Marc Oaks Takács’s between Muhyiddin īdn-al-̔Arabī and Christian mysticism. The last essay in the first part, “On Some Suspicions regarding Comparative Theology,” by Glenn Willis examines the challenges by George Lindbeck and Jonathan Z. Smith to comparative theology and urges an approach to other religious traditions with a deep sense of the inadequacies of one’s own traditions.
Part 2, titled “Comparative Theology is What Comparative Theology Does,” offers five actual cases of comparative theology work done by Michelle Voss Roberts, Maryanne Moyaert, Muna Tatari, Francis Clooney, and Shoshana Razel Gordon-Guedalia. While all of them are richly informative, I find the ones by Marianne Moyaert and Francis Clooney most challenging. Moyaert (“Comparative Theology After the Shoah: Risks, Pivots, and Opportunities of Comparing Traditions”) warns us of the “violence of odious comparisons” of rival siblings as found in the commentaries on Esau and Jacob. Clooney (“Difficult Remainders: Seeking Comparative Theology’s Really Difficult Other”) courageously analyzes the Garland of the Mīmāmsā, which he describes as “a difficult, dry, detail-driven treatise, seemingly devoid of sentiment and mysticism” (210), to gain useful insights for Christian theology. What indeed can such a text possibly have anything to say to Christian theology? In his attempt to learn from the Garland, Clooney offers 20 passages from this Hindu text and urges readers to struggle with them, and “to take seriously a particularity that resists subsumption into a system constructed in Christian terms, for Christian reasons” (226).
Notwithstanding the sophisticated scholarship of the first two parts, it is the third part that, in my judgment, opens new horizons and new paths for comparative theology. Unfortunately, its title, “Recognizing Comparative Theology by Its Fruits,” is somewhat misleading. Its four chapters do not discuss what the title seemingly implies, namely, criteria by which to judge the validity and usefulness of a particular comparative theology, as the tree is judged by its fruits (Matt. 7:15‒20). Rather they introduce new fields and contexts for comparative theology. Unease has often been expressed about the narrow focus of early comparative theology on sacred texts. While such textual focus is necessary, and perhaps preferable to scholars and theologians, in real life sacred texts are made alive and meaningful in experience (Emma O’Donnell), preaching (Brad Bannon), interreligious living (Michael Barnes), practices such as yoga (Stephanie Corigliano), and, one may add, hundreds of other contexts. To most believers, the Veda, the Bible, the Qur’ān, and other sacred texts are closed books, barely known and hardly understood. What little knowledge and understanding they have of them is derived from their experience, sermons, sharing life with people of other faiths, religious practices, popular piety, and so on. These lived contexts, no less than texts, should be objects of comparative theology, which requires collaboration not only with theologians but also with scholars of comparative religion, anthropology of religion, and sociology of religion.
How to Do Comparative Theology is a splendid work of scholarship. It offers rich information on what comparative theology is, provides concrete examples of it, and indicates future directions. All the essays are very well written, challenging, and enlightening. I strongly recommend it for courses on new trends in contemporary Christian theology.